Scott Smith knew this day was coming, but that didn’t make learning he was being evicted from his rental rowhouse any easier.
“Last week, they put up the billboards…the development billboards and that’s when we knew this thing is happening,” Smith said.
It has become an all-too-familiar fight in Vancouver — tenants forced out of their rental homes because of so-called demovictions.
A 12-storey building with 62 rental units is being proposed for the corner of Oak Street and West 10th Avenue. If approved, it would mean the demolition of Smith’s home, along with 12 others.
Smith believes the city can’t afford to lose any more homes like his: rowhouses that include a shared backyard. He said that kind of community and green space is nearly impossible to find in the city nowadays.
“This is a type of housing that is vanishing in Vancouver. The townhouse with the communal backyard, where the kids play together and all this stuff and it’s affordable,” Smith said.
According to NPA Vancouver Councillor George Affleck, such homes are also the right size for growing families.
“I’ve been saying for six years that perhaps we’re focused on the wrong kind of development,” Affleck said. “We learned in a recent report that the kind of homes that are both occupied and affordable are townhomes and rowhouses and that we need to focus in my mind on building more of those in Vancouver.”
The more than three dozen residents who live in those rowhouses could be out of a home by summer.
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